The humble onion, apart from being sautéed in most Indian kitchens daily, has also become a point of intense debate with its steep prices. Selling at Rs.80-100 a kilo last month while lending itself to Twitter satire, this ‘symbol of a troubled economy and rising inflation’ has only stabilised to around Rs. 60 a kilo now, thrice its normal price.

But these gloomy times have led to some sunny days at Groupon India. The Indian arm of Groupon Inc., the big daddy of deals on the internet, has been making the most of onions while they take the centrestage in daily debates. The deal site has been selling onions at Rs. 9 a kilo, in a 7-day deal beginning 5th September, where deals for a maximum of 3000 kgs will be sold every day. In fact the website had also crashed when these onions were sold out within 44 minutes of the announcement!

The Groupon ‘onionified’ deal has been sold out for today within 9 minutes, while 14,499 deals have been bought so far. Now the site has put up a notice for deal hunters to come back tomorrow at 1PM. Interestingly, ‘onionified’ has also leveraged social media in a creative manner.

Onionify on social media

The deal was unveiled last week through a series of teaser updates on the Groupon India Facebook page.

This was simultaneously accompanied by a Twitter contest. Users have been asked to tweet funny with the hashtag #Onionify with a Google Nexus tab on offer. #Onionify tweets are still going strong and did even manage to trend in the top 10 India Twitter trends.

Onionify making news

For a deals site that has offers on restaurants, beauty, fashion and electronic goods on any given day, Groupon created a massive buzz with the first-of-its-kind onion deal. Apart from the social media promotions by way of contests and organic reach as one just can’t get enough of the buzz on onions, the Groupon onion deal has made big news. The highly discounted deal was covered by many major publications like the Wall Street Journal, Business Standard, The Economic times and many more. A screen shot of these articles now adorn the deal site at Groupon.

The contest on Twitter with #Onionify has managed to fuel a good amount of conversations on Twitter. As per Topsy (a social media conversations monitoring tool) for the period of Sept 6th until 9th 11 pm, #Onionify has generated more than 3K conversations and created an exposure of 2.79 million.

While we do not know the outcome of the rising onion prices on the upcoming elections, clever marketing around the staple onion has certainly ensured Groupon a wider reach and increased traffic, coupled with strengthening its deals branding.